


ii.ii two or twenty

by remnantof



Series: One For The Road [3]
Category: Destiny (Video Games)
Genre: Abusive Parent, Awoken/Human - Freeform, Committed Relationship, Hunter/Warlock - Freeform, Intercrural Sex, M/M, Mild descriptions of trauma, Oral Sex, POV Original Character, PWP with a little plot and a lot of feelings, Partially Clothed Sex, Romance, Single POV
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-06
Updated: 2019-09-06
Packaged: 2020-10-11 09:49:36
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,737
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20544164
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/remnantof/pseuds/remnantof
Summary: Returning from fieldwork, meddling ghosts and relatives conspire to let Lux in on a conversation he isn't ready for, but needs to hear.  Set after TTK and Red War.





	ii.ii two or twenty

**Author's Note:**

> This could just as easily go in the PWP series, it's an incredibly indulgent mash of feelings and porn. 
> 
> I had an errant idea about Lux overhearing Cael being a stubborn little shit, and ran with it for 7700 words instead of continuing to chip away at longer fic about how they got to this point in their lives. As always, Cael is my OC and pretty much everyone else mentioned in this belongs to [Comptine](https://archiveofourown.org/users/comptine).

> _here is a brick with blood on it. (fact)_  
_i am speaking from my heart. (fact)_
> 
> — richard siken

Lux’s hip fights the spring in his step, three hours off a three month tour of Europe’s hollowed coast. But he’d showered on his ship, squeezed said hip into older but cleaner gear – and walked hip-first into the hospice. It hurts enough to drag his posture on the right, but he whistles a breathless little tune when he gets off the elevator, and Epsilon beeps an improvised chorus.

His stalwart little Ghost has several soft spots, but only one with an obvious source.

“You talk to her every night,” he teases, grabbing an apple from the basket on the security desk. Epsilon’s eye spins back to pin him in his periphery, while he waves with three fingers and Adicia nods him along. She has the knowing, arching gaze he’s come to associate with every Valois he’s met, down to the errant ancestor he’s shacked up with.

It’s Epsilon’s fault, really. Does it count as living in sin if your Ghosts are married? If you’re gone for months at a stretch?

If you divide most of your time at home between snatches of sleep, cups of coffee, and an infant?

Every woman in Cael’s family seems to think so, and, if Lux lingers for long enough, gives him a look like he’s supposed to do something about it.

He smiles at Adicia with apple sweet behind his teeth, foaming on his tongue. The crunch interrupts the letter of Epsilon’s protests, if not the spirit. It is the way of memory, absence, and exhaustion, for his mind to wander away from his feet as they carry him down the hall – Cael sat on his desk with both legs primly crossed, paring an apple with his letter opener. Biting slices in half just to show Lux his teeth, while he’d squirmed in Cael’s straight-backed chair, tasked with keeping his hands on the edge of his seat.

Lux takes another bite, thinks about Cael feeding him the other half, when what he’d wanted was those teeth. Thinks about how his hip is going to fare, if he tries to press Cael down against his desk. He might have to spend a little light on him before dinner.

Knowing Cael, he won’t even need to ask.

Epsilon keeps slightly ahead of him, flitting over-under loose white drapes – light and lifting on the breeze. Sunlight streams in with the fresh air, and for all their knowing gazes, Lux can appreciate that Cael works in a place where he has family, a place filled with light. Can appreciate that they still have a place to go when they’re tired, and a reason to return before they run themselves ragged.

For Lux, it used to be the Tower – and Cayde’s office sits at the end of another long hall, atop another steady elevator – but hours two and a half were spent giving his report on Hive expansion and Fallen politics along the coast. But the halls of the Tower are full of ghosts, and in the Hunter wing, you never know who you’ll find walking under a familiar cloak.

Apple on his tongue, tart and crisp; white linen lifts in the sun and he breathes in. White linen goes blue in a shadow, dropping on the breeze. Lux remembers the dream where he follows Cael’s silhouette down a beach, turns the familiar back of his coat around by the shoulder, and finds it full of a stranger.

He hears Dareus’ voice and breathes out until his diaphragm hurts. Epsilon lands on his shoulder and pinches him above the collar of his soft shirt, returning him to his body in the present, and making him feel violently under-dressed.

The navy blue of a dress uniform might be the only armor his father respects.

Cael’s coat is a shade too violet, the accents a shade too coral, to count. Lux doesn’t doubt he’s wearing it, if Dareus Tyndarid is speaking loudly enough in his office to be heard through the heavy door. The sound muffles and mutes, Dareus getting control of – some emotion he won’t voice that loudly again, until he’s in his own office, dressing down a proxy.

Epsilon pinches him again; Lux is frozen outside the door, sheer curtains trailing their folds against his back and arm like the hands of every other thing he can’t walk away from. He remembers to breathe, and when he can’t make out the words murmured through old cedar, he touches one of Epsilon’s points in request.

His Ghost opens the connection to Piko, and his father’s voice filters out of Epsilon’s core. It’s worse when Epsilon lowers the volume, too intimate, like Dareus has him tight by the arms and is speaking directly to his ear. He isn’t raising it now, but Lux knows the tightness of his tone.

“The Tower might still run him across the continent, but I will be allowed to see my son when he is in this city.”

“I didn’t realize I was stopping you from doing so.”

Cael’s own voice is deceptively light; no matter how tightly it winds, no matter how straight he might sit in his chair, there’s something like humor in it. A click in the throat, a rolling, reflexive rhythm. Maybe it’s that hint of Eastern Europe, maybe it’s how long he’s known him – Cael has a talent for laughing at men without making a sound.

More than once, Lux has found no recourse but to kiss the laughter out of his mouth. He doubts Dareus is similarly inspired.

If Dareus ever raises a hand to Cael – Lux takes an abortive step toward the door, but it’s a thought – like many thoughts concerning his father – that sinks his steps. Strands him in rising water and sand. The question: what would he do, and would it be more or less than he’s done for Cas?

The answer doesn’t really matter, when both curl shame in his gut.

“If you think I don’t know your type, Lupei, you are sorely mistaken.”

“I don’t think you do. I think you believe, in this moment, you aren’t a sad old man, having a go in my office because I won’t let you into my private home. Because the son no longer obligated to speak to you, largely, does not.”

Lux stops that single step closer to the door, holding his breath. He knows his father will be back on his heels, looking darkly amused, mentally tabulating the resources he might use to destroy Cael for the comment – but he might just use his hands, if Cael keeps pushing. If those resources seem lacking. It’s just possible enough that he can’t walk away, and Dareus’ presence squeezes enough air out of any room that he can’t go in. Not with Dareus wound up, not with Cael in his favorite armor, by turns bitingly rude and maddeningly reasonable.

He’d suffocate, and they’d both be unimpressed.

Epsilon offers to cut the feed, but Lux shakes his head. Cael always seems particularly able to goad his father – or maybe Lux just hasn’t seen anyone else put in the effort. There’s a history in how they speak to each other, one he can’t ignore, but can’t imagine being in a room with either. He might learn something he doesn’t want to know.

They both make him feel so vulnerable, but seem so – impervious to each other. Like their gazes would never so much as meet, if they didn’t both look for him from the edges of things, if Cael wasn’t an obvious priority, and Dareus didn’t so obviously begrudge him the fact.

His mouth is dry, and when he tries to close his hand around the apple, it makes a fist; it’s nowhere in sight, likely transmatted out of his hand before he could drop it.

“You’ve only recently found any kind of family – _any_ kind of legacy, I’d imagine. Even now, do you feel the lack of a father? I don’t think I’ve ever seen you or your child within ten feet of Zavala. How do you think Lux feels, embarking on this – filial experiment – with both of you going blindly at it, no input from his own father to guide him?”

“Oh, I think he misses that deeply; Andal Brask would have been a fine godfather.”

His gaze cuts to where he knows Cael must be, just behind the white walls and silver magnolia door. It’s a different aesthetic from the manor – lighter, welcoming – but Dareus’ presence warps the space, reminds him that his refuge still has _an aesthetic._ Still has a veneer, the kind only people with their money can maintain. Lux is no less exhausted for this moment, but – he misses the coast all the same. It is exactly what it looks like, on the outside, it contains all of its contradictions on its surface.

A war zone, and a ghost town, and absolutely thriving where the lichen is concerned.

Dareus scoffs, fed directly to Lux’s ear: “Is that who you’re playing at, these days? Do you think yourself equal in import, or power?”

“Well, you are in my office, playing concerned father and asking me to change my mind. I imagine the Vanguard is the only other place you play this nice.”

Lux walks himself to the wall, several feet down from the door. Puts a hand to the moulding around a greyscale landscape, painted directly to the plaster. It feels like a wish for a child to make – that a place could be so beautiful, you could believe nothing bad will happen within it.

“I wonder if you’ll even last as long as he did. Pollux knew the man for all of two years, and Brask would have promoted him out of his sphere shortly enough, had he lived. You think I believe he’ll tire of you, come to his senses and run home?”

Dareus doesn’t wait for Cael to answer, perhaps knowing well enough that Cael would find one. “I’m his father, and I know him – and I do know you, Lupei. People who come into this life from the outside, people who make something of themselves. It’ll be you who tires of him, in time. Men like Andal Brask have made my son useless for anything but their own ends – I simply want him to know he still has a father, when it all falls apart.“

Lux uses the hand on the wall to keep himself upright, giving into the painful slip of his hip and leaning. The words churn his guts, speak deeply enough to his fears, to fights he and Cael have had, that he wonders if Dareus knows he’s here. He certainly seems to realize Lux will look for Cael – and Lux has no illusions that Dareus doesn’t know where they live, regardless of being given an address. but it is beneath his father to loiter in the lobby of an apartment complex, where Cael would certainly chase him directly into the photographers who still try to buzz themselves in on false errands.

Money never did much for Cael’s manners; he is also a war zone, and a ghost town, and so alive he defies the size of his body, and the ways it has died.

Lux is sick to his stomach with fear that Cael could outgrow him, and sick to his heart with missing him, when Piko interrupts her own feed to cover for the fact of it: _Pollux? Cael is still busy, he suggests you get a table in the mess hall – he’ll join you shortly._

He rests his forehead on the cool plaster, takes a deep breath, doesn’t move. He knows Cael is only trying to protect him, that Dareus is hoping he will come here after the Tower, knock on the door while they talk in circles. But he taps Epsilon’s spine again, just to prove he can lift his numb hand, just to hear the rest of it. Cael could just as easily be protecting himself. When Cael puts on a veneer, it isn’t pretty at all. Lux thinks it’s the only time he seems attainable, when he’s trying to be something no one could want.

He knows just as well in those moments, how to lift his hands and prove something.

The length of Cael’s silence sits across his shoulders; he feels ridiculous, on edge. He should knock on the door. He should be able to save Cael from his father. Cael didn’t grow up with Dareus, doesn’t react to him the way Lux and Cas are trained to – but he’s still alone in a room with him, being cornered and berated by a man used to conquest.

“Dareus.” Another pause sets the name aside, and he imagines Cael acknowledging him with a glance, dismissing him by finding something more important on his desk. What he cannot imagine is the face Cael makes when he says, “If it’s two years or twenty, I’m going to marry your son.

“You won’t be there when I do, and there’s nothing you’re going to do to stop it. You can pull your fatherly concern over yourself to keep warm at night.”

Lux might smile – might be smiling – if not for how it feels like all the air has been squeezed out of him. The plaster under his hand, the queasiness sitting in his throat, the stretch of his face around his teeth; they don’t connect him to his body in the moment, and it feels like they’re talking about someone else.

“Don’t be so sure of the future, no matter your supposed lineage.”

“I’m more than sure of the past – Andal died, and he didn’t go back to you. I left him, for years, and it wasn’t you he called. In his worst moments, if your son thinks of you _at all,_ it is how they remind him of being in your presence. And that is your fault.”

How does Cael seem to know him by looking at him? At what point did Lux run out of mysteries – will Cael ever be as gentle with his truths as Lux is with the scars that run up the back of him? He thinks about Cael pressing him into his chair with one foot on his hip; he thinks about Cael telling him to keep his hands to himself. At this point, his doubts about Cael do nothing to love but resign him to it.

“Now stop making that face and loitering in my office; I’ve already told Lux to meet me elsewhere. You’ve grown so transparent in your old age.”

Cael says it into his ear as Epsilon presses soft shock to his neck. It forces him back into himself, into the present – where he can process the words and understand that, logically, his father will exit stage three-feet-to-his-left.

More importantly: Cael will know Lux was listening.

He might know that anyway; his relationship with Piko has always made a kind of sense to Lux, from the outside. Epsilon is rarely happy with him, but indulgent, protective. Something between Andal and Cas, but in a grudging way that eases the ache it should cause. Piko is fonder of nonsense and comfort than Ep, but Lux has never felt like she and Cael _get along._ It doesn’t mean she won’t rat them out.

Lux can’t do anything about it but pray, as he pushes off from the wall and heads for the stairs he knows Dareus won’t use, for the mess hall he knows Dareus won’t visit.

As he closes with the desk, Adicia points out the door with her pen, a silver handle in one of the decorative panels of the wall. Her gaze sits on his back as he disappears into it, and he realizes – she would have let Dareus in, knew he was still in Cael’s office when Lux walked by.

Two years or twenty; Lux has never doubted the Valois family’s claim to Cael. He remembers Helike’s debut when they were fourteen – Cas’ toe is still a little crooked from how hard she’d stomped on his foot. It wouldn’t entirely surprise him if one of them took credit for the knife in his hip years later, exactly as knowing and terrible as Cael talking to his father about Andal fucking Brask.

He’s feeling it again, sharp and draining, at the bottom of the stairs. Epsilon has just enough light left to balm Lux’s side. His thigh loosens into the next step, and, as with many moments in his life, momentum gets the job done.

-

Cael, when he arrives in the mess hall, is not the kind of wound that makes demands about the dessert cart. Gathered into his coat and feeding folders into Piko’s storage, he has the stiff bearing of a stone in rising tide. Controlled flurry, controlled fury, a ruffle of papers like lapping waves. Lux knows it’s his own tight anger, coiled fear – and for all Dareus seems easier for Cael to bear, it still isn’t _easy_.

Last time he’d seen Cael wound this tight and falsely pleasant, he’d thrown his stiff posture over Lux’s sparrow and driven it into a wall. He feeds the last file into Piko with a flourish and tugs Lux down by the collar with his other hand, kissing him too-hard on the cheek before letting him go.

His other hand pushes his hair back, letting it fall forward from the motion as he squeezes irritation into a tail, tugs the back of his own head, and smiles knife-cold with his eyes.

If he tells Cael he reminds him of Ikora, he’ll sleep on his ship for a week. They’ve tried the couch, but Cael always comes out to sleep on him anyway.

Most times, he comes to the ship, too. Going to bed angry is more of a fun game they play, than something they make an effort to avoid. Today, Cael is the rock and tide both, eddying around Lux in his jet-lagged, secretly-shaken stupor. His cheek burns where Cael raked his lips over stubble, his thigh feels as stiff as Cael’s wool coat. The warmth of the mess hall, the smell of food and the sight of Cael twisting hair in his fingers – it’s nostalgic, still warm, but it isn’t home.

Home is just down the river and missing them, and he knows – Cael has kept it safe. He knows – Cael doesn’t appreciate the intrusion of his office. Cael would rather Dareus raise more than his voice, that he might close off every space.

Cael says: “I’m not really hungry,” and smooths Lux’s collar back into place.

Lux wants to say: _Dareus’ true face is the back of his hand_, and, _I’m sorry_. Lux thinks Dareus might still do something he’ll owe Cas a warning about. Jet-lagged, secretly-shaken Hunter brain says: “Yeah, me either,” and Epsilon ejects an apple core loudly into the composting bin.

Piko plays her laughter in midi on the way out.

-

Lux dips his hip on a single step before Cael winds an arm with his, there to lean on, to tug Lux away from well-meaning patients and nurses, ever willing to be the rude one. He should appreciate it less, when the people here mean so little harm, but – he is tired, and he does want to shut himself in a room with Cael and wrap his head around the plunge his life has taken. His hip and his heart feel like they’re missing a bottom step, the softly painted halls both wider and more claustrophobic for immediate memory.

Lux’s heart drives him like a stolen thing, where Cael is concerned. The Cael who vowed to marry him is largely the same as the one he left three months ago – he moves the same, speaks the same. The same line exists near the corner of his mouth, that leads every frown, creases out of sight as he tells well-wishers and hospice guests that he is hogging his errant boyfriend for the day, and his office is closed.

Looking at it drag when someone comments the wilds have been good to Lux, he realizes he loves Cael’s frown. He loves when Cael is angry or irritated, for how often it ends with both of them laughing, or trying desperately not to.

Cael is often irritated, endlessly unimpressed – but rarely unhappy, these days. He doesn’t seem unhappy when Lux leans on him in the gardens, or when he blinks them onto a passing ferry to spare Lux the longer walk. Whatever protective instinct sent Lux to the mess hall instead, whatever mild possession makes him declare things when and where Lux shouldn’t hear, it mellows on the river. The ferry is full of university students and retirees, and they aren’t the only pair sitting against the rails, thigh to thigh and holding hands. One older couple shares a wide afghan under the weak Autumn sun; Lux tries not to stare while Cael drops a hand to Lux’s thigh, rubbing solar light along the inset.

“I’m going to embarrass us both if you keep that up.”

“Don’t presume what embarrasses me,” he says, hand firm and hot through Lux’s old cargo pants. Turning to study the sweep of Cael’s hair, the curve of his ear, Lux resigns himself to being half-hard on public transport, lets Epsilon drop his cloak across their laps. Cael finds his knee under the folds, resting his hand at the end of the tight muscle: the touch of his solar light is like waking from deep sleep, the comfort of finding hours left before the alarm, the freedom to sink back in. Even when he’s been gone for months, even when Cael is frowning, or they’ve been fighting – Cael’s touch soothes most ills.

If Lux is a stolen thing – Dareus must be who he was stolen from. Andal, first; Cael, second. He’s passed hands, but he’s never had to go back. Cael is never going to be out of mysteries, but Lux thinks he knows a few. Dareus drops by Cael’s office when he’s away, and Cael is never going to ask Lux to do something about it – but Cael might ask, one day, if Lux would marry him.

Lux is definitely smiling, aware of more than his body’s aches, when he lifts his own hand to rub at the tense line of Cael’s neck. Cael stops biting his lip and looks at him – and bothered isn’t the word for it, but he searches Lux’s gaze for something, seems not to find it, seems not to mind.

Kiss me, his shoulder says, hitched on the other side of his head. Lux leans in to press it below his ear; Cael turns his head to sigh the day away, against Lux’s mouth. Lux hums in response. “We’re getting ramen tonight.”

“We are,” Cael agrees, a second sigh that pulls him away by inches. His disapproval is aimed along Lux’s chest, down the cling of his thermal shirt. “And you’re not heading back out until we get some fat back on you – doctor’s orders.” His fingers squeeze the lean muscle of Lux’s thigh, driving a laugh from his throat.

“That doesn’t really seem fair, considering.”

And he does consider – the shape of Cael’s knuckles, the notch of his spine. What Cael does with his light, the mix of void and solar, drains and burns him down to absolutes. It’s cleaner than drug binges and spare living, but he wonders if Cael even tries to keep up, if his cousins keep him eating in Lux’s absence.

“I’ll eat as many bowls as you do,” Cael promises, and Lux grins, looking forward to it. The Cael he has now is something viciously edited, someone who worships at an effigy of control – and he is at his absolute best, set against chaos and excess. Lux leans in and puts his face in the fall of Cael’s hair, breathing him in, sighing his own tension out, thinking about spilling it all over the pillows at home.

Cael moves his hand along Lux’s thigh, digs his thumb into the crease where it meets his hip – hard enough to make him jump, when the muscle spasms. “Fuck, _Cael –_ ”

“What have you been doing, since you got home?” Cael’s gaze is too-shrewd, and Lux’s heart doesn’t settle from its quick pace. “Jumping your sparrow over rooftops?”

“Looking for you,” Lux answers, softening the honesty by adding: “It was one rooftop.”

When Cael tells Lux, knife-bright, that he’ll have to show him that trick sometime, Epsilon lights up in his center, retiring their current sparrow to the bottom of his inventory.

-

Cael knows the ride better than Lux; when he blinks them back to the shore, he’s the one to make sure Lux’s cloak isn’t left behind. “Cover your halfie before I lead you home by it,” he says, tossing the cloak around his shoulders.

“I thought it didn’t embarrass you.”

“Don’t presume what _doesn’t_ embarrass me either.”

For the most part, Lux is simply glad the ride home didn’t completely wear him out. With the specter of Dareus chased from his mind, there’s only the familiarity of Cael’s silhouette, walking slightly ahead of him. The fact of being home, and touched, and teased. “One more,” Lux says, leaning his weight into a kiss at the top of Cael’s head, cloak slung over his shoulder and arm slung over Cael’s, pressed down along his chest. “I didn’t eat enough to get sick.”

The look Cael sends along his arm is skeptical, but the evidence is in his favor.

Lux braces his stance before the blink, and they land on their balcony. Neither of them have too much dignity to break into the apartment – another game, at the end of a long and trying day. Cael snaps the lock with a violet spark, sparing Lux a fourth blink through the sliding doors. Lux, to his credit, puts both hands on the rail and stares down the drop while he does it, heaving neither dry nor wet down the side of the apartment complex.

The apple’s still a little sweet, when it threatens to come backup.

“Where’s Idris today,” he asks, his hands guiding him rail to wall, metal frame to Cael, as he walks inside.

“With the Gunsmith.” Lux puffs a breath in Cael’s ear, wondering if he ever calls Anya that to her face. Gunsmith, Sword-Bearer, Crota-Killer. In his long absences – babysitter. “It’s her turn,” Cael adds. “She loves him.”

One of Cael’s mysteries is why he knows Anya Utkin, Crota-Killer, at all. Another is why he feels any need to defend her. As far as Lux is concerned, she’s one of the rare babysitters who takes the dog with the kid, and a legend of a Hunter going back to the days before the City – his esteem couldn’t be higher. “Truly,” he murmurs, nosing Cael’s hair away from his ear, “he is a miracle for Hunter and Warlock relations.”

“He’s certainly one of them.”

Cael doesn’t need to put a hand on Lux’s dick, for Lux to know he’s talking about it. He feels around for another piece of furniture to lean on, cock his hip away from; Cael rolls his eyes as Lux visibly steadies himself on the corner of the couch, and Lux is thinking that he loves that too, the bright flash of those familiar, alien irises, when Cael trips him over the arm and catches the end of his cloak enough to slow the way he crashes over it.

It pulls Cael after him, until his knees hit the edge of the couch, but he lets go before Lux can yank him in. Busies his hands on his coat, peeling himself free while Lux lays on his back, one leg thrown over the arm of the couch and the other sliding onto the floor. Epsilon transmats his boots off before he can hurt himself struggling to untie them, and he flops back into his cloak, fingers raking his own thighs before they open his belt instead.

Cael, in his own mood to conquer after a run-in with Dareus, makes an ugly kind of sense. Not a mystery solved, but the shape of something. Andal handing Lux a rifle and narrowing his life down the sights, after a night where his father stalked the Tower halls. Cayde sending him back to Europe after Andal died, and Cael told him to leave.

Cael would blink Lux across a hundred rivers, up a thousand balconies, if the deafening silence of the void could erase the sound of Dareus’ voice. Instead, he’s unbuttoning his coat in a way that buttons him into his own mind, where Lux might coax him out but can’t follow. Being bossy might not help him out of his own head, but it’ll free Lux of his, be infinitely easier on his hip. Months of masking that weakness in the field leaves him stiff, unable to hide it at home. And Cael would know, does know, when he lays his coat over the back of the couch and picks Lux up at the ankle, his expression stoic and inscrutable.

Lux groans in a way that has nothing to do with his dick, when Cael folds his leg in against his chest, putting his weight on it until Lux is shaking with the way the muscle snaps and stretches loose.

Alright: it has a little to do with his dick. The joint pops in a way that hurts just right; he wallows in the ache, pants open and hands over his face, while Cael stands up to undo the belt of his shift. Between Lux’s fingers, he unwraps himself like a precious item, shipped in pale linens.

This isn’t the first time Piko’s shown him something he wasn’t supposed to see: her judgment of what is and isn’t private goes both ways, and Epsilon’s loyalty to her is equal or greater than what he affords Lux. Once, when Lux was trying to understand the gap between the boy he’d done bloom with at nineteen, the ruthless Voidwalker who’d helped him take down Taniks – and the monstrously put together healer who lived in an office at the Valois hospice – she’d shown him a moment from the time between. Cael had been skinny from too much bloom, washed out in a way Lux hopes he never sees again. He’ll never really forget the way he’d lit up a little, tucked into his first wool coat. The way he’d touched the hems with just the tips of his fingers, drawn his feet together and stood to his full height. Looked at the person in the mirror and murmured, as if for the first time: _Oh, I like that_.

He’d walked away from her at the first sign of tears – wishes he didn’t know how it had, could still, wound Cael to like the person he saw in the mirror. It had reminded Lux so much of himself, the first time Andal put a cloak around his shoulders, that he’d ached. That his heart started to forgive what his head still struggles to.

Lux wonders if Cael, at least, will ever solve his own mysteries. There is no sign of that boy now, the man he grew into perfunctory and neat with his clothes, while Lux rolls his head back in the folds of his cloak. He replaces it with his arm when Epsilon transmats it away, laid back and enjoying what Cael exposes of himself without Piko’s interference.

He’s going to take him shopping, while he’s home. It’s a specific pleasure, to see Cael irritated and satisfied at once, looking at the price on a pair of boots he loves. It’s another to pluck them out of his hands and dig out his card, when Cael starts to put them back.

Worth every glimmer chip, when they’re hugging Cael up to the knees over dark tights, and he’s not wearing anything else.

He crooks a finger in a hole along the seam of Lux’s old pants, tugs until his leg lifts with the fabric, and shakes his head. If he takes Cael shopping this week, he’s going to be trying on as many pieces as he lays over Cael’s arm, his credit run up for a new pair of trousers to match every heel and coat. Today, Cael just pokes him in the thigh and says, “Turn over.”

There’s nothing false or bright in his tone, but Lux still suspects he’s due to be straddled and ridden into a wall. “No,” Cael says, when he immediately slithers off the couch to comply: “On your knees should do it, up against the back.” Cael’s height and concern for Lux’s knees dictate that they stay on the couch, whatever his machinations.

“Not much of a view,” Lux complains, wry and leaning into the brace of his arms along the couch.

Cael pulls the wallet from his back pocket, tosses it to the side – the better to run his hand over Lux’s ass: “Not for you.” But he walks around the couch, a muted clip of heels on the carpet. Lets Lux guide him in by the hips and kiss the beat of his heart, adjacent the line of his sternum. His hands smooth up Lux’s arms, over his shoulders, until they tilt his head up with both palms pressed to his throat. Lux is almost content, with Cael’s thumbs rubbing over his beard, with his chin on Cael’s chest, rising to meet him halfway in the kiss. Almost isn’t terrified, wondering what it might be like to buy Cael a ring.

If that’s all it was; if Cas and Luka make it long enough to prove something, about Tyndarids and rings, about the people Tyndarids love.

When Cael pushes himself away, against Lux’s shoulders, Lux lets him go. He needs – something Cael knows better than he does, most days. To get out of his head before Cael’s words hurt more than they heal, touching things he didn’t know Cael could see.

He needs to get out of his head before he starts to worry how Cael feels, Idris with another Hunter, cornered in his own office, twenty years a perfectly reasonable estimate for the spike of fear in Lux’s chest. Before he worries about the push of Cael’s hands, the turn of his head, Cael not kissing him stupid the second they’re alone.

Cael seems just fine, tugging Lux’s pants down over his ass and smoothing a hand up his back, dragging the hem of his shirt on his wrist. His nails run back down; Lux shivers under the touch, asks if he wants any of it off. Gets his ass squeezed with those same nails biting skin, and his briefs dissolve into Piko’s inventory. He probably has better pants at the bottom of it, stripped out from under expert knots, picked up from office floors. Cael wouldn’t bother with what he has on now; doesn’t even tug them more than half the length of Lux’s thighs, the pads of his fingers bristling thick hair against his skin. It’s satisfying enough that Lux flexes under his hands, until Cael does it again, harder, and grips his ass to keep Lux from backing into a drop.

The coffee table shuffs across the carpet, Cael making space to kiss the small of his back, moving upward with one hand firm at Lux’s hip. Piko must have a few of his better shirts tucked away – Cael slots behind him with biting intent, teeth sinking through fabric and skin at his shoulder.

When Lux groans and pushes back, Cael grinds up against him through his tights, slippery fabric against skin and hair, hot as the hand against his hip. Cael manages to catch his ear between his blunt teeth, tug, murmur: “I’m going to make such a pretty mess with you.” The kind of promise and praise that shouldn’t, but always, makes Lux a little stupid for it.

He spreads his legs ‘til the tether of his pants holds him; Cael runs his hands over his legs, idles his fingers in the belt loops, grinds lazy enough that the only worry Lux can think of is how long he’ll stretch the tease. Laying his head down on the back of the couch takes some weight from his arms, lets him roll his shoulders and beseech Cael with one dark eye – ask for a kind of pity Cael only seems to possess when Lux desperately needs it. Lux knows Piko hasn’t ratted them out when Cael smirks around the foil in his teeth, lube in-and-on-hand, and only slicks him down to his balls to tease hard fingers over his hole.

This is not the treatment Lux deserves, after the day he’s had, but it’s the treatment he’s getting: Cael slicking the skin between his cheeks before he rolls his tights down, spreading them with both hands as he slides in and squeezes them up around his dick. He laughs at the way Lux reaches back for his wrists, hips, anything to make him be more than a horrible tease – because they both know he’s going to be, and Lux is going to let him, face-down in the couch cushions and groaning for it.

His hands give no more quarter than his dick, scratching lightly as he opens his hands to pull back, digging in as he squeezes Lux’s ass and pushes forward. It isn’t long before he’s as hard as Lux is, seething tight little breaths between his teeth and driving himself over Lux’s hole, gasping between Lux’s gasps and giving him nothing to flex open around.

“Cael, please,” he huffs, minutes stretching, measured in the seconds it takes his body to tense up, hold, and shiver himself a little harder. Measured in the slow drip of warm lube over his balls, the wet slap of contact that does too little, but cannot, _cannot_ stop.

Sweat prickles along his spine, at the backs of his knees; he almost feels Cael’s dismissing hum in the press of their thighs.

No pity, no mercy, even when he steadies one hand on Lux’s hip and reaches the other around. He doesn’t even give him a fist to push into, a single stroke – just runs his thumb across the slit of Lux’s dick, winding him tighter into his own body, driving him out of his head with the impossible build of pleasure. Cael’s hands are hotter than his cock, searing the scar tissue at his hip so deep it lets Lux pop his ass back and roll forward, bucking his hips between two points of torturous contact.

Treat others as you like to be treated – it’s a dangerous thing in Cael’s hands, when he loves the slow grind, the long tease. Likes to be surprised by how little can make him come, given enough time. An effigy of control, set against excess: knobby joints under pristine wool, scarred lips against Lux’s neck, long days in six-thousand glimmer heels.

Lux wants to see the stretch of those legs between his calves, the shift of muscle as Cael doesn’t, actually fuck him. He wants to come and he wants to make Cael come, wants it hot in the small of his back, because he knows – Cael would want that, if he’d pushed Cael onto the couch and pulled his tights down. Cael wouldn’t even want the hand on his dick – he’d bite down on the couch cushions and refuse to beg, live for the moment his body short-circuited and came from the rub of Lux’s dick over his taint. He’s going to have to try it later, now that Cael’s put the idea in his head. He’s going to have to –

Not think about the other ideas, Cael’s put in his head, regardless of intent. There’s not a lot to think about, when Cael covers the slit with his thumb and just-so, pinches the head of his dick between his fingers. Gives it the slightest pull, just a little mean – and Lux thinks he’ll be trapped in the moment forever, that Cael might not let him come, might not actually know what the fuck he’s doing. Then Cael pulls that much harder, leading Lux forward by the dick, and he whites out, loses it with a sob. Feels himself clench around nothing at all as his balls draw up, Cael’s press hotly behind, and he shoots all over Cael’s fingers and the upholstery.

“Cael,” he says, when he breathes again; “Cael,” when his leg feels weak and he doesn’t, for a moment, understand why. His life narrows along the scope of “Cael,” and “fuck,” and the raze of every nerve adjacent to his numb thigh.

Cael bites that laugh into his shoulder as he extracts himself, and in the only brand of kindness he knows, transmats the mess away before Lux flops into it. His hands are still warm on Lux’s hips, helping him turn over. Pressing him into the cushions while his body shivers through it.

Lux says his name again, sucks the air it takes back through his teeth. Tips his head against the back of the couch and groans, watching Cael tuck himself back into his tights, still hard. He knows sometimes denial isn’t just a thing Cael thinks he deserves – it can be as much a game as anything else, a prelude to pleasure. But he’s been away for months, and so far as he can tell – Cael makes no effort to fill the gaps Lux leaves in his life. He just _waits_.

Two years or twenty.

“_Cael_.” When he looks up, lips pursed in a smile, Lux pulls him in by the hips. Slips his fingers a little clumsy on the smooth fabric over his thighs, until Cael straddles his lap, takes up Lux’s position on the couch.

“What,” he asks, warm laughter in a single syllable. A rasp his voice only gets when he speaks this quiet, this close. Lux looks at the way his boots hang off the couch, satisfaction grinding in his chest, while he reaches into Cael’s tights and tucks his dick the other way along the seam, head barely covered by the dark stretch of fabric.

“Nothing,” Lux answers, breathing deep. “Just looking at you.”

Cael puts his hand back through Lux’s hair, indulgent, rubbing his head in a slow circle and tugging affection to the roots when Lux leans in to taste him. He kisses Cael’s dick as wet and thorough as he’d like to kiss his mouth – fuzzy-headed and consumed, lingering until Cael’s hand pulls him back for air. Air in his lungs, air cooling the wet fabric between them. The head of his dick pokes shiny, purple against his abdomen, and the marks curled on his shoulders match the pale pink of his ears, when lays one to the other and sighs as soft as the sweep of his hair.

Lux’s heart drives him like a stolen thing: into a wall, into this, over and over. Two years or twenty, he’s Cael’s until he isn’t. Nineteen and riding a high, twenty-seven and riding the aches of his early twenties. Whoever he comes home to, whoever Cael puts on in the mirror, he wants to see it. He wants to kiss him, he wants to lean in and run his tongue from smooth fabric to smoother skin, until Cael chokes out his name.

He folds the first inch of fabric down, sucks the head into his mouth, until Cael folds down around the feeling and Lux’s head. Until he’s behind a curtain of hair, fingers pulling his own. It’s claustrophobic, hard to breathe – just the way they like it – too close for comfort, but close is the thing they want.

Lux swipes his tongue through the slit, harder than he should, relentlessly enough that Cael’s thighs shiver under his hands and he scratches Lux’s scalp with his nails. A little longer still, until he feels the cushions move at the back of his neck, hears Cael whimper into the fabric – knows to suck him deep enough to aim it down his throat when Cael comes.

Breathing through his nose, he lets Cael chase his mouth when he lays it back in the cushions, into the indent Cael makes with his teeth. The head of his cock rubs over his tongue, slides sideways over Lux’s lips, when those twitching hips pull him out and push back in. Lux runs his hands up Cael’s thighs, gentles them on his ass – holding him, resting in the feel of Cael’s dick on his chin, going too-sensitive in the bristle of his beard. Cael’s laugh is caught in his own throat, wheezing out when he feels Cael sit back in the cup of his hands. He smooths his hands over the curves and angles of his body under his tights, and just – hums. Murmurs, “What?”

“Just looking at you,” Cael sighs, fingers loosening in Lux’s hair. Petting it into something neater when he leans in to kiss him, as soft and messy as Lux has missed. Home – he’s home, pulling Cael closer with the grip on his ass.

Cael braces a similar grip on his chest, nails making new wrinkles in his soft shirt. Lux is still half in his pants, underwear gone, the edges of Cael’s boots digging into his thighs. He breathes deep, kisses sloppy, eyes lidded when Cael drags his lip out between his teeth. “Rest, for awhile,” he says, nose brushing Lux’s tip to tip. “We’re picking up Idris tomorrow.”

He’s almost home, as close as he can get without the weight of their son on his chest. Lux shakes his head even as Cael pulls away, groans at the feeling coming back to his legs when Cael tugs him by the hair, the shirt, pressing him down along the couch. Epsilon shimmers Lux’s cloak into Cael’s hands, laying it over him while he fights the pull of Cael’s light on the weight in his bones. Cael sets his coat on top of it, too heavy to be denied.

“We’re going out tonight,” Lux protests. “We’re getting dinner.”

Cael sets a warm hand on his forehead, smoothing his hair back. “After you sleep. Don’t worry; I’ll be here.”

Sinking into the promise of that hand, Lux thinks – if it’s two hours or twenty, he believes him.


End file.
